While the HN crowd mostly gets this right when framed as a math puzzle, my guess is that confirmation bias is alive and well in high tech just like in any other field. One example:
Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?
With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia:
"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."
Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?
EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.
It is part of the conversation. There was just an NPR Forum segment about it yesterday or so. There are articles about it sometimes (e.g., http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...). This solution often ends up not being pursued because it's extremely expensive and energy intensive not only to desalinate but to then pump the water to where it needs to go, and you also have waste product to deal with. So in many cases it has been decided that other avenues, like conservation, are more economical.
As long as it is cheaper to exploit an existing clean water source than to spend the energy, and invest in the massive and in some cases unproven tech and engineering infrastructure to build desalination plants, then that's what will happen.
It's unfortunate, because the cost to future generations, or the biosphere doesn't calculate into our current economic system, and most of the commercial infrastructure is aligned against re-calibration of that kind, because it would cost them dearly.
I live in Florid; we have a large desal plant here as part of our water supply. It took years to get it working well, along with a few lawsuits; they're not easy, or cheap, but well worth it.
That is talking about the water you use in your household. But that is a tiny faction of all water used in total. Industry and farming absolutely dwarf household consumption.
A ton of water is used to grow Alfafia. There is no way it's profitable if you had to desalinate it first.
More realistically, California stops growing alfalfa and stops raising beef cattle altogether. That would free up enough water to water every lawn across the state.
I was just looking into a fake lawn for my next house, but you don't recoup the cost for 7 years. The builder has been putting in smaller lawns in the front, so we'll likely put a small one back and be smart about watering it (not in the middle of the day, properly position sprinklers etc.). Or we'll xeriscape it
The cost to build desalination plants to service millions of residents would be BILLIONS. Tens of Billions. Money that is available, just being spent on other things...
The issue is the waste... the salt that's left over. What happens to it? In the Persian Gulf (I think...) they have basically killed everything in the water from the abundance of salt that's been put back into the sea water.[1]
There is a theory that if we continue making the Gulf warmer by putting so much salt in, it could be a catalyst for plunging the world into an ice age. Who knows if that's true.
Already here in New Zealand we are exporting some of our fresh water to very rich people over in Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. Can't link the source, it was a court news article about some guy who assaulted someone. He was exporting prime NZ lambs, and water tankers...
The salt was in the water to begin with. If you read that reference that you posted, you'll see that the problem is the waste chemicals (not salt), and the increase in temperature of the water. It's plausible that they could filter out the waste chemicals, but I'm not sure about the heat.
Yeah, you're right that salt is in the water already and isn't technically waste. I just called it that because as a 'left over', it feels like it's waste.
However... it doesn't mean much that salt is in the water already. You're taking the water out, but leaving all the salt. That can't be good at all.
I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post.
I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.
Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.
Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.
I've had the opposite experience with my blog; as I've increased the amount of original research and writing in my posts, I've seen traffic steadily decline over roughly the same period.
The conventional wisdom with blogs has always been that the way to success is more frequent short posts rather than less frequent long ones, and that still seems to be the case. I don't really care much, since I don't run ads and my goal for my blog has never been to capture a large audience anyway, but more readers would always feel better than less.
Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:
I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.
I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.
So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.
Yeah, it's the curse of the generalist. My interests are so catholic that my blog ends up being about everything, which means as far as Google is concerned it's about nothing.
I have had the same experience...without the longer articles and additional hours.
...I basically maintain a blog just to keep notes for myself about current things that I am working on. Each post is short and to the point. The titles are not "click bait". I figured that if I needed it someone else might as well and I am leaving it up to the search engines to figure out relevance.
...funny thing is it gets decent traffic and next to 0 on monetization. I allow Google to place ads so that the url rental is free.
Next to no traffic prior to Panda...pretty decent traffic for the topics (some are very specialized and esoteric like a specific bit of code to extract a Sales Order from Quickbooks Enterprise).
This is so encouraging to hear! I'm not much of a writer myself, but I am super happy that Google is able to translate quality into results. Keep it up!
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.
Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:
Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?
I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.
Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:
All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.
I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:
However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.
I don't think it's that easy. My book on Amazon currently has one 5-star review that's just one word and two 5-star reviews with two words each. I am the author and the publisher, and I know for a fact that these reviews are not fake. But they probably come across as fake. I think that there some people who just want to share their opinion of a book without making an effort to write a good review.
Personally, I'd prefer to have only reviews backed up with an explanation. If a book is good, tell me why. If it isn't good, I'd like to know why you think it isn't. That's the only way to make the next edition better.
I have noticed an increase of reviews that typically contain a subject of "<Number> Stars", and either no review body, or a very short review body, such as "good book".
I too hate reviews like that, but I think it's due to Amazon nagging customers to leave reviews for things that are purchased on the Kindle. I am beginning to suspect they have an app or form somewhere where you tap the number of stars and write your review in a text block.
The Kindle prompts to "Rate this book" when you reach the end of an e-book. It doesn't give you the option to enter a review, but only select the number of stars.
Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move.
Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy.
If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.
They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.
The effectiveness of reviews is predicated on the population of 'helpful' reviewers being greater than the population of spam reviewers after some level of filtering.
It's unclear if a crowdsourced flag would tip the balance of helpful vs spam in any useful way for categories where there's already a unhelpful level of spam.
You could have a reputation system where vote weight is gained for correct identification of upvoted bogus reviews. Then your spammers are forced to fight each other in order to upvote their own spam. Start everyones voting weight at zero until they've spent $x.
Would it really reveal the existence of fake reviews? How many people are unaware of them? Sure non tech-savvy people maybe, but those people are aging rapidly. Amazon needs to get ahead of this problem, because if the end result is that their rankings are shit, that will be much much worse for them in the long run.
I worked on the customer review team at Amazon once upon a time. There are definitely fake reviews, and Amazon is well aware of "review rings" where people trade reviews, vote each other's reviews up, etc. Much like Google, they stop some and allow others, because the more feedback you give scammers in general, the better they can adapt.
In short: fake reviews and fake review upvotes very much exist and are WAY more rampant than you'd ever believe. It's an 80/20 or maybe 90/10 problem - most of the review content on Amazon comes from a small percentage of active users, and as soon as you become active on the site you start to get sucked into this sort of thing.
The problem is your "this looks fake" button would be as easy to game as the current system. People with a financial interest in a book would be marking every negative review as fake.
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher is the best book I've read about the process of getting to intimately know one specific company. It was written long before the phrase "focus investing" was coined. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger frequently recommend this book.
Those who routinely keep 10+ tabs open may be motivated to switch to Firefox or Opera due to slow browser start. The above 2 extensions solve the issue. I explain in more detail here:
The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab.
In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:
I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow.
Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
As a Chrome developer, I agree that process-per-tab absolutely should not be a replacement for fixing bugs. However, I think it's important to point out that process-per-tab is not just for stability: it's also critical for security.
Chrome is way ahead of Firefox in terms of security. It's worth the performance trade-offs.
Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.
Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.
For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.
In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.
I actually have more problems with Firefox's performance than with Chrome's (in terms of processor power), Chrome definitely uses more memory, but it's super fast; firefox is just abysmally slow and can;t handle more than a few tabs. Tried both browsers on Windows 8.1 and Linux, with different machines (home and work computers), too.
However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.
My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.
You should also keep in mind that everyone dosen't owns a high end machine or even a macbook. I have 4 machines at home , maximum specs are 2.5ghz with i3-4gb , and I guess this should be sufficient for running chrome alone , well atleast theoritically. In reality , chrome starts being unresponive , crashing tabs and stuff occurs beyond opening tabs beyond 7-8 and flash player crashes more often. Anddd , firefox is sure late to start ( a longer startup time ) , but idk how it manages to sustain itself throughout.
In one of my machine , I have arch installed with bspwm as WM ,and firefox takes about 150-200 mb only ( when I'm aggresively testing it ) , with 7-8 tabs. Chrome , well ...
uBlock is now available on Firefox too, and makes an even more dramatic difference in performance.
I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.
It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.
I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.
My typical browsing has about 50–100 background tabs (stuff kept around to look at later), with spikes up to 300+ (when I’m actively researching something). This kind of usage in Chrome absolutely trashes system performance, especially if any of those tabs happen to have gmail/gdocs/gmaps/g+ stuff in them (ironic, huh?), or other heavyweight sites like facebook. Safari and Firefox mostly don’t have a problem, though restarting the browser once every few days can sometimes help clear up some memory/CPU.
There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.
Chrome does not load every website into its own process: it does a lot of cross-site process sharing, and often very large numbers of sites can end up in the same process. It also does not keep each website into only one process, so in practice if a lot of tabs exist for one process (whether malicious or vulnerable) you can be assured of an overlap as you can end up in every process.
We should also keep in mind that Google is a content company, and is leverageing their market share to bring us such wonderful features such as HTML5 DRM support in our browsers.
I'll just throw that in there but Firefox Linux - since you refer to that (99% of what you just mentioned doesnt exit on windows/osx) - so yeah, Firefox for Linux uses the Chromium sandbox. You know, the exact same code, with a different filter and options applied.
Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....
I found your statement very interesting, and would like to learn more. If you're allowed, would you please provide more details or links to resources that further explain the security issues that process-per-tab resolves?
There's a bunch of good public docs on the Chromium security architecture. One big thing that having a separate process per origin does is that you can use OS sandboxing techniques on each process separately, and even if there are renderer bugs, an exploit can't immediately get to another origin; it provides defense in depth by also requiring a sandbox escape.
Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):
I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension.
For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
Tree Style Tabs is essential if you keep many tabs open. Not only does it make it possible to read the window titles and use screen real estate more effectively, it facilitates tab hierachies (parent page A opened links to B, C, D, parent page B opened links to E, F, G, etc).
There is a very simple extension called Tab Counter which works very well together with TSTs and it helps to remind me when it's time to clean up the tab bar. It also appears to bring peace of mind that all tabs are still there, it's just the missing status bar. :)
Between Tree Style Tabs and The Fox Only Better[0] I can't see myself going to Chrome or any other browser. The UI is pretty much hidden until I need it, giving me maximum browsing space.
If you tend to accumulate tabs and forget to close them then the Unload Tab [1] extension is a must.
Your browser becomes laggy after opening 5 pages with flash elements? Just right-click on the current tab > "Unload Other Tabs". You can also set it to automatically unload background tabs after a certain amount of time.
I find that over time I end up with a bunch of tabs whose content seems interesting that grow over time. My working set is off to one side while the 'to read' tabs stack up over to the left.
I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.
Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.
Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.
Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.
It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).
And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.
More than being more organized, it's really changed the way I browse. Throughout the day I'll build buckets of things to read/deal with and keeping them in groups makes it incredibly simple (and less stressful) to run through.
I'm old school. My to-read queue goes off to del.icio.us. After all the switches and selling and buying, in the end, it's not half bad. Bookmarklets plus droidicious on Android and I have a dependable bookmark store.
In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.
How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)
I use an extension called switch to tab. It uses the omnibox interface to auto complete what you type and switch to the right tab. (and when I'm switching back and forth multiple times between two tabs, I just have muscle memory for how many tabs apart they are).
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).
Not GP, but:
multiple windows and intuition. Generally, for ~20 tabs per window I still can tell pretty okay what is what, only large swabs of similar tabs (e.g. 10 ebay product sites) are a bit annoying. A tab switcher that shows the headlines would admittedly be helpful.
In Firefox, I either scroll quickly though readable tabs with the mouse-wheel, or click the right down-arrow for a text list of tabs, or start typing in the address bar of whichever tab I'm in. For example, if I type twi then the drop-down list offers Twitter, and I select "Switch to tab". That gets me to the half-dozen tabs I want to look at several times a day.
With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)
>I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects.
It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.
Why is "a list of bookmarks grouped by folders" organized, but "a list of tabs grouped by windows"(potentially with the support of tree style tabs or something similar) crazy and messy?
The Great Suspender will remove the tab's contents from memory after a freely configurable time, while still keeping it where it was in case you want to get back to it later. I've found that this works best for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
+1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly.
I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name.
> I like to keep dozens of tabs open
Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.
When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.
Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.
I had similar thoughts recently. This kind of hierarchical and persistent 'view' into a graph (the web) could possibly be useful in other contexts (perhaps even as a general computer interface), and not just for graphs but generally as a hierarchical scratch board for queuing and structuring tasks and information. I'm thinking about implementing this in an experimental package for Emacs.
As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.
It's also the reason why I switched from Chrome to Firefox. Sure, having 150 tabs open does slow down a machine at least a little bit, but god damn does it feel good to be able to do that without having to horizontally scroll though all 150 of them individually.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome right around Firefox 3.6. I have an average of around 20 tabs open at any given moment, and I tend to go around a week or two between reboots.
Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.
I also have better luck with tabs in Chrome. Overall CPU usage is lower, and the in-browser task inspector makes it trivial to ID bad tabs and close them.
Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.
It's certainly not the only issue with running Chrome on machines that aren't configured just like Google's. If you try and run it on a Linux distro which limits the number of open files per process to 1024, like most do by default, it crashes when you try and open more than a handful of tabs. Turns out that Google run a custom version of Ubuntu internally with the limit raised to something like 32,768 open files per process, so they never ran into the issue.
I frequently have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on Ubuntu without any problems and I haven't touched the open-files-per-process limit. You must be talking about a problem with older versions.
We are in the weird situation where even most web application developers run their dev environment on beefier machines than the VMs they are hosting it on.
Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox.
So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.
Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):
---
I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.
I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating factor). Currently using 5.4GB of RAM (OSX is reporting a "Compressed Mem" of 2.96GB), and it's currently pegging one of the cores of the i7 on this thing. This is after about a week of nonstop (i.e. same Firefox process) use, and with Flash present in a lot of places (like the 20+ Github tabs I have open, thanks to Github using Flash for its silly "click here to copy a link to your clipboard" feature; I really need to get those wretched things blocked); a lot of things will clear out pretty well after restarting and restoring the opened tabs (though this is partly because they're not loaded into memory again until they're accessed again).
EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.
I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.
Same here. I'm regularly hitting 200+ tabs on multiple profiles for various reasons (news, documentation, etc.). This is precisely why I use Firefox for all my browsing usage (and have for some time). Chrome/Chromium chokes once you hit about 100-150 tabs, and the tab UI is not usable once open tabs fall off the edge of the window (there's probably an extension to fix this).
Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.
I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!
I don't doubt. Firefox with hundreds of tabs works well with 4GB RAM, and somewhat bearable on 2GB, with occasional restart once per week or so to clean it up.
On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.
> why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.
Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.
I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.
My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.
Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)
I have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....
Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development (maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on Android or (jailbroken) iOS if you really wanted to), it's not going to be nearly as productive as a high end workstation (portable or stationary) with 16+GB of RAM and a quad+ core processor.
Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.
I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.
I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.
Yup. Similar to the mobile html5 app I am rescuing that ran smoothly in chrome om the developers desktops with 16 gb of ram and core i7 and what not but the complex animations are shockingly less smooth on the iPad 2. Weird
Talking with vendors is always great -- those moments when their eyes get wide and they say "You mean you're doing that? We never intended for anyone to do that!" I had a moment like that just last week on a visit to one of our hardware vendors.
This extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... helped me a lot keeping multiple tabs under control. I tend to leave tabs open for days, sometimes weeks, and come to them later. I don't want to waste memory all that time to just keep a tab open. So this extension helps with that.
Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain.
Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.
Chrome has a menu item toggle called "Warn before quitting" that I just enabled, and it has already saved me a bunch of times!!!! In OSX it's under the Chrome menu item (before File), don't know where they stuck it in Windows.
I can't seem to find this in my settings : (. This bit me every once in a while, and as I keep hundreds of tabs open, it's a huge pain in the ass to restore Chrome. I ended up remapping the ctrl+q shortcut to do nothing.
I switched to Chrome a few years ago for the same reason. Another reason was Chrome had an 'omnibar' that takes in both urls and search queries. I was instantly sold on that.
Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues.
Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more.
Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.
I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.
That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.
I've used the Chrome task manager to kill tabs. There is one process in there that's just called "Browser"--that's obviously the parent, and the UI won't let you kill it.
You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.
I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.
It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.
The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.
Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.
No. Firefox's multi-process support ("Electrolysis" aka e10s) is only enabled in the Nightly channel. Firefox does not yet use tab-per-process like Chrome. Nightly only uses two processes: one from the browser (the "chrome" process) and one for all tabs (the content process). You don't get crash or security isolation between tabs when they all share one content process, but that process can be sandboxed by the OS and it reduces memory overhead. Firefox will later experiment with multiple content processes, comparing one vs N tabs per process.
I regularly use Chrome on windows with ~100 tabs, and it ... just works? It is a bit annoying that it loads everything immediately on start-up, on the other hand once it's done everything is available without further delays. Firefox seemed to get slow/stuck easier, but I haven't tested it extensively for a while.
I don't know, I've had one tab cause other tabs to crash all the time, which is something that confused me considering the supposed isolation that should be happening.
edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause.
Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
I use Chrome as my only browser. On my desktop, I run an average of 20 tabs open at any given time, across two windows. I also run Chrome on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) and keep 4--8 tabs open at any given time. I reboot my desktop once every 1--2 weeks, and my phone maybe once per month.
Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.
Our workflow sounds similar, except that when my system reboots, Chrome is frozen for a minute as every tab tries to reload simultaneously, following by confusion as any youtube tabs all start playing.
On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
Chrome on my girlfriend's PC did that in the middle of the night once or twice. I guess Windows or Chrome decided to update or something, not sure which, but all the YouTube videos in all the tabs started playing in the earlier hours of the morning.
The main reason I stuck with Opera 12 is how well it handled dozens of tabs (I remember counting 96 in a long-lasting session). Yes, the memory usage was high, but it never felt slow. After switching to the new Opera, I was pretty disappointed, and even switched to Chrome (because the new Opera is a poor man's Chrome in a way), but after a while I came back to Opera. With that said, Vivaldi looks very promising, but it's still too buggy! I'm holding my fingers crossed.
I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005.
It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.
Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel.
However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years.
I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features).
But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.
Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations.
I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.
Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)
Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.
For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...
It's too bad that Barnes and Noble's ecosystem (free books, emailing books to your account, lending library, etc.) was and still is so inferior to Amazon's. Amazon has yet to produce hardware anywhere near as good as the Nook Simple Touch model created over 3 years ago. But clearly, the ecosystem matters more. I'm using my Kindle while my Nook gathers dust.
Agreed that online reviews are broken. That's what drove me to co-found a company that takes a different approach to reviews, one which stresses category over individual products.
Start with the premise that the person you most want to give you advice is someone who is passionate about a topic or at least has done a lot research on it. If you ask them for advice, first they'll give you an overview, which hopefully includes what attributes you should be thinking about. Then they'll recommend a small number of models to consider, based on what you seem to be interested in. If you're doing this with other people around, perhaps a few other people will pipe in with suggestions.
So - for example - if you're looking for 3-4 player board games more interesting than Sorry and Monopoly - so interesting that they have a decent chance of getting your friends and/or family members more into gaming - I prepared a guide on our site that does just that:
(Note: site styling is incomplete - we're not quite ready to launch)
The essential idea is that if you narrow a topic down enough (i.e. 7200 RPM HDDs that are very quiet and can easily survive a several foot drop onto a hard floor), there's probably somebody out there who's taken a great interest in that narrow niche and can write about it very well.
On the other hand, it's hard to write about the too-broad hard drive category as a whole, and it's also difficult to talk about one hard drive with little context.
Doing the first 2 lessons will not only get your a vagrant powered VM up and running, it will also give you a good feel for normal use. And you'll also be learning Django.
Gross market cap lost during a CEO's reign is a poor measure of performance for a variety of reasons:
* stock prices often get de-linked from the underlying value of the business (and the starting point for Ballmer was the height of the stock market bubble)
* percentage drop seems far more important that gross amount dropped - quite a number of CEO's have led their companies to bankruptcy, and therefore a 100% drop in stock price.
* business forces outside of a CEO's control are responsible to a great extent for business performance. I would argue that Leanard Riggio (Barnes and Noble) was one of the top performing 50 CEOs in the last century in the face of very challenging headwinds but you'd never know that from the way the business (and its stock price) performed.
* dividends are another form of value returned to shareholders - and Microsoft has paid some over the years.
Also - it turns out that GE's Jeff Immelt presided over a drop of approximately $350 billion (601 billion Aug 2000 --> 246 billion today), and John Chambers even more (557 billion March 2000 --> $125 billion today)
So if the point of the article is to write about the CEO who presided over the largest market drop in U.S. history, the article should have been about Jeff Immelt or John Chambers.
Note: Intel's market cap also decreased more than MSFT during the same period but had more than 1 CEO.
Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?